Farewell to Prague. Desmond Hogan

coming here. And now I am living away from San Francisco. There is a thrift store in the nearby town which is fun. I purchased a little mink for $1.50 and a crocodile handbag for $1. Last week down in San Francisco I accidentally met with some boys from Dublin – they’d met on an Alaskan pipeline. They were joking and laughing. It could have been in a pub in Dublin. One of them had a pet goat when he was growing up in Ballyfermot.

      Auntie Dymphna had a goat which had been deported from the garden next door. She used to keep her in the back. Once she nearly sent her to the butcher.

      It’s autumn now and there’s a crispness in the evenings and the swallows are gathered by day and all the sounds are set apart from one another by night. It would be great if you came to America. The places you mention are each wonderful and there are also other things that are wonderful too. I work in a drug rehabilitation centre. It’s very nice here, quiet. Northern California greatly resembles Ireland – the land is green and there are many trees and rivers. There are no lambs. This is not sheep country.

      I’ll light a little candle for you – it is shaped like a mushroom. Blues and yellows and whites.

      I think of candles around a golden Virgin in Chartres and a sanctuary lamp suspended in a convent chapel in Mayo.

      You talk of Ireland and of England, of endearing landscapes as ‘a common country’. But something about being surrounded by my past – by mistakes – weighed me down in Ireland and in England. Each way I turned they would confront me, sometimes mockingly. Though I did not realize it for many years I had to be away from them.

      It is an odd place, California.

      I’ll fly now.

      14 August 1987. An old Italian stands to attention in front of the Child Jesus of Prague. There are sea shells and jewels at the feet of the child and yellow irises mixed with gypsophila in front of him; what could be riverine flowers, yellow flag, hornwort, the bogbean flower, which were always a relief for a lone and stellar cormorant.

      Messages are sculpted on the wall. Thanks from Michele, Toronto, Canada. Dékuji Adrienne 1944. Graci a Familia Cacho Sousa. In a frame a picture of the Church of Minino Jesus de Praga, Rio de Janeiro, palmettos outside it.

      Further down the church there are angels with gold brassieres and batons under the blue and pink smoke of an Assumption scene. The Czech women had a reproduction of Poussin’s Death of the Virgin in their home in County Galway. A boy from the North of Ireland I knew in London, a carpenter, had the same reproduction on his wall. He had a row over some repair with his oily Greek-Cypriot landlord who reported him to the Anti-Terrorist Squad. They burst down his door and when they found nothing never bothered to apologize or fix the place.

      A sunset over the high-rise. The sun is an isolated boll and a pale blue mist rises to meet it.

      ‘Where I live there’s a couple who have just come from Mexico. He’s French. She’s American. You would like them. The opportunities for going so many places offer themselves here – South America, the Orient, Russia, India.’

      There’s a song coming from a ghetto blaster: ‘Running Away Forever with the Shepherd Boy Angelo.’

      A tapestry has been hung from the balcony of one of the flats, showing night in El Salvador: bodies rising from graves, men in cowboy hats being tortured in police stations, devils pulling naked women out of houses, nuns in outlandish wimples kneeling outside confessionals, Indians praying by open coffins in their sitting-rooms, houses, under huge coconut trees, going up in fire.

      In one flat I pass a group of young people, some in baseball caps, are huddled on the floor. A boy is playing an accordion. Its borders are tallow and green-coloured and its body is gold. There are bottles of red wine on the floor around. Cervano Vino.

      In Paris in 1968 I went to a concert given by a guitar-playing priest in the basement hall of the high-rise in which I was staying and drank wine for the first time, red wine, coughing it up.

      Eleanor was in Paris the same summer. She lost her virginity to the father of the children she was minding. She liked sitting in the cigarette smoke of tables on the Boulevard St Michel. When the first chestnuts came to the Luxembourg Gardens we were both preparing to leave. But she was returning to the three-tier trays of cakes in Bewleys and the prospective boy-lovers from Rathmines and Rathgar and Monkstown.

      ‘Remember you told me how that blond solicitor leaned towards you in the toilet in Toners. That French boy looks like him.’

      She wore a white blouse the night before I left Prague, silver caterpillar brooch on it, a little black hat, spears of black lace standing up on it, black leaves imprinted on the lace. Her face was nearly that of a skeleton, powdered and pearled. She sat beside me, singing along with ‘La Paloma’ as usual, head bowed.

      There were two lovers seated on a bench on Wenceslas Square, the girl wearing white bobby socks and a skirt of cedar-green with pink roses and ruby crab-apples and pale green leaves on it, her head inclined towards the boy’s thighs. Around them the humble blue and red and yellow of Traktoro Export, Machino Export Bulharska Telecom Sofia Bulgaria, Lucerna Bar, Licensintory Moscow USSR, Vinimpex Sofia, Licence Know How Engineering, Hotel Druzhba.

      Next morning there were marigolds being sold all over Wenceslas Square before I got the Metro to Leninova.

      Tinker boys in white shirts and kipper ties outside St Saviour’s Church of John the Evangelist and St John the Baptist in Lewisham as Sunday mass proceeds inside, looking like boys outside churches on Sunday in Ireland.

      A plea for the Peru missions near the railings and a sign saying ‘Do you want to know more about the Catholic faith?’

      One of the women has taken home a collection of pamphlets with saints’ faces on them – Blessed Margaret Clitheroe, Blessed Cuthbert, St John Fisher, St Thomas More – I notice on my next visit to them and when I feel uneasy and an intruder, as I often do on these visits, I browse through them.

      On the windowsill is a girl dancing with sunflowers at her feet, a scarlet bow on each of her feet; two matchstick caravans; two toby jugs; a lampshade held up by an elephant who has foxgloves at his feet. To the right of the window a photograph of Vincent, the dead boy, beside a picture of Marie Goretti.

      ‘It’s all going back to the 1300’s,’ the youthful and even-voiced father says, and we discuss a recent court case in London where a girl was prosecuted for killing a rat. Now that winter is moving in there’ll be no more journeys this year for them. But I’ll be leaving Lewisham for a while before the end of the year. I am planning to go to the United States.

      All this was a year ago. Now it’s summer. I am separated from every country in the world. I hold Robin’s card and grasp for seconds the last night on Wenceslas Square, the powdered salvia, the lights. But after having been nearly swept out to sea, and having toyed with the idea of suicide, there’s a decision, despite the emptiness I had to fight, to keep trying for a path.

      I keep hearing the voices of ancestors which started up in Prague.

      ‘He’d never have become a priest but for your vigilance.’

      I see a clutter of young, newly ordained priests cycling into a town, bunting strung up and confetti being thrown at them, a middle-aged priest walking behind them, throwing bonbons from a biretta to children.

      My mother, deep down, had hoped I’d become a priest.

      After her marriage, as she walked out the Galway Road wheeling me, her boyfriend passed, the one she forsook because she had tuberculosis, on his way to the Galway races. He stopped his car, admired me and said: ‘He’ll have to do great things, this child.’ When I was three I got a gift of a river boat for Christmas. Ultramarine and white, with yellow wheels on it. A fat little fellow, I was standing at one end of the long dining-room, holding the river boat, my mother standing on the other side, crying.

      Last Christmas I went to the land of river boats, the Deep South. I’ll go back to Alabama I think, get a job hewing wood. Always, always, there is something keeping you apart in England. The ancient war. Always,